Not that I think the idea is implausible.

Errors in production have been a staple of the archaeology of childhood for a long time now, with studies of both stone tools and pottery pointing out that learning implies developing skill, so that learners should be detected through products made with less skill.

Over a decade ago, Kathryn Kamp (in 2001) and Patricia Crown (in 1999) proposed that children learning to make pottery would have produced characteristic products that showed less skill and/or more error. They both drew on general theories of cognitive development, stressing that children would only be able to carry out particular steps in production, or indeed, conceive of a production sequence, at specific ages. Crown’s study assessed the likely age of the maker by examining how designs were drawn, relying on cognitive studies showing children develop skills for different steps in drawing at different ages.

Nor have such analyses been limited to pottery.

In 2006, John Shea published “Child’s Play: Reflections on the Invisibility of Children in the Paleolithic Record” in Evolutionary Anthropology. In this article, Shea provided an exceptionally clear model of what we might expect the evidence of children learning to work stone tools would look like.

Among other things, he noted that “learners are profligate knappers”.  In his experience teaching students, they produced twice the debris that he, as a more accomplished crafter, did. This led him to observe that a large proportion of ancient lithic assemblages might actually testify to the presence of beginners:

learners’ knapping byproducts could actually outnumber those of competent adult knappers in some assemblages.

Shea also observed that learners produced the most variable assemblages; he suggested that “stone tools made or used by children are likely to be relatively small, to fit the small hands of their makers or users”; and that learners would likely have been restricted to local, easily acquired, low cost materials.

Many of Shea’s suggestions are exemplified in a lovely article published in 2008 in the Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory. Called “Playing With Flint: Tracing a Child’s Imitation of Adult Work in a Lithic Assemblage”, the article presents a case study from a Neolithic site in Sweden, based on theories of learning as a social activity.

The author, Anders Högberg, detects spatial evidence of a single highly skilled craft worker, producing a highly stylized tool type, surrounded by debris from lithic working that was significantly more varied, “the unsystematic production of flakes”. The skilled producer used high quality raw material, while the “unsystematic” work was on low quality material. His conclusion is that a skilled adult worked on a formal tool, observed and imitated by a child who moved around more, and who, while able to produce worked flakes, did not do so to the systematic ends of the worker being imitated.

So what surprised me wasn’t that an archaeologist had proposed that a child had made a less-than-perfect stone tool; it was that Archaeology apparently thought this was news, when in the research world I inhabit, it is decidedly not.

My reaction to studies like this is somewhat different. Since we have long used evidence of less skilled craft production as a way to infer the presence of children, we have also faced the fact that the equation is neither simple nor automatic.

We debate whether we should assign the role of learner automatically, or primarily, to children. One of the things I like about Kathryn Kamp’s decade-old article on Sinagua pottery making is that, while she reviews the literature on children’s motor skills and cognitive capacities, when it comes to talking about the archaeological evidence, she asks how we can see “beginners”. Not children– beginners.

Then there is the problem of identifying error. Kamp provides cautious guidelines, noting that while beginners probably often do make errors and produce “imperfect products”, there are reasons why an experienced crafter might produce a less-than-perfect product. This point is echoed by others.

What makes the study by Anders Högberg so useful is that it mobilizes a number of different kinds of evidence within a framework that acknowledges all these issues, to conclude convincingly that the less systematic crafting at the site was likely done by a child.

His use of the word “unsystematic” avoids a problem in interpreting some craft products as showing “errors”. It is only when he considers whether this could be an adult that the word “error” even comes up:

The trials and errors of a skilled toolmaker would exhibit flake material which revealed a purpose of making an artefact recognisable as a typological form.

This makes the definition of a skilled craft worker clearer: someone who works with a purpose of making something systematically is fully embedded in a craft.

Högberg then is able to contrast children– not just beginning learners– with skilled adults by emphasizing play as characteristic of the cognitive approach of a child: unsystematic by definition, even though based on imitation.

I do not want to assume that the Archaeology magazine news item fully represents the study it mentions. So I do not conclude that the author, Sigrid Alræk Dugstad of Stavanger University, is uninformed by this preceding literature.

Indeed, much of the leadership in the archaeology of childhood came from Scandinavian archaeologists following in the footsteps of Grete Lillehammer, who published an important article on archaeology of childhood in 1989. Högberg cites this tradition of research in his article, and Lillehammer herself wrote the introduction for a collection of papers, where Dugstad apparently made the argument that is now getting attention.

This edited volume, published in 2010 by the archaeology museum at the University of Stavanger in Norway, is called Socialisation: Recent Research on Childhood and Children in the Past. It was based on a 2008 conference of the Society for the Study of Childhood in the Past, which also publishes an entire journal devoted to the topic, Childhood in the Past.

In the conference program, Dugstad’s paper appears with the title “How abortive artefacts can be informative archaeological research objects”, as part of a session dedicated to children as stone tool makers. The abstract for her conference paper touches on the points made in the other studies mentioned here– play, learning, and the importance of looking at stone tool products in context:

Teaching skills and passing on knowledge were very important, and we can assume that much of the transfer of knowledge happened relatively early in life, either through play or more structured apprenticement. Technological processes, tools, waste and retouched pieces as well as their context and associations can give opportunities to get closer to individuals, e.g. children.

So how do we get from this research, clearly part of a rich, decades-long tradition that has developed strong grounds for inferring children’s actions, to the flat-footed pronouncement that “Stone Age Kids Learned by Doing”?

The Archaeology brief note was based on a press release from the University of Stavanger. The Archaeology note is so brief that it never makes clear that the press release cites a source, an article, titled “Early child caught knapping: A novice early Mesolithic flintknapper in southwestern Norway”.

Frustratingly, though, the university press release does not give a full citation of the publication venue. But despite the changed title, this almost certainly refers to the paper in the 2010 conference volume Socialisation.

The press release also refers to a masters’ thesis incorporating this work, presumably Dugstad’s 2007 thesis “Hushold og teknologi: en studie av tidlig preboreale lokaliteter” (Household and Technology: A Study of Early Preboreal Localities) listed in the university’s online catalogue.

I have not been able to obtain a copy of the conference volume to see the full paper included there. What the press release suggests is that the study was firmly rooted in, and fully cognizant of, the wider body of work about children, crafting, and learning in the past. Dugstad is cited as saying that

a succession of failed strokes, terminating in many hinge and step fractures, indicates that axe was made by a novice flintknapper, probably a child.

Where Dugstad’s argument appears to differ from the other examples cited here is in taking a single, less well shaped artifact as a kind of signature of a novice, who she infers would have been a child:

the axe has probably not been produced by an adult. Errors are too numerous and striking to have been performed by a skilled and experienced flintknapper. This is probably a child’s work.

Other researchers have urged more caution, taking a comparative approach that sketches out contrasts between more and less well made products within a single social setting. Dugstad is quoted as suggesting that a more experienced craft worker would have had the skill necessary to correct errors, rescuing the work in progress, rather than repeatedly trying to fix one error and making another, leading to the discard of the tool in question:

one can see that the axe was made by a person with poorly developed theoretical knowledge and motoric skills. Given the numerous and characteristic failed strokes, it is also probable that the beginner had not received any form of direct instructions on how to proceed in manufacturing the tool.

The key phrase here is “poorly developed theoretical knowledge and motor skills”.  These comments are not included in the Archaeology news item.

Consideration of the relatively undeveloped motor skills and cognitive challenges of children as learners has been central to the arguments about children learning crafts that have been published over the last decade.

Theories of learning do more than point us toward analyses of errors in production. In a paper published in the book The Social Experience of Childhood in Ancient Mesoamerica, Jeanne Lopiparo suggested that adults in the Ulúa Valley of Honduras between 500 and 1000 AD made molds to help beginning learners– specifically children– produce competent examples of figurines. As I described her conclusions in Ancient Bodies, Ancient Lives,

molding served as a technology that allowed anyone, regardless of skill, to produce an image that was recognizable and that represented the contributions of different people to the social group. Lopiparo suggested that children would have been especially important participants in the crafting of figurines, learning how to be members of their society through their participation in the shaping of these conventionalized images.

The archaeology of childhood crafting is probably one of the best examples of how to think through identifying human actors in convincing ways using material traces. I just wish that Archaeology online had used its wide reach to help people understand just how rich and well developed this literature actually is.

A story from the online English-language edition of the German news magazine Der Spiegel tells us that “Germany sees rising interest in execution site archaeology:

For years, few were interested in unearthing what lay beneath old gallows and scaffolds. But, in Germany, growing interest in “execution site archaeology” is throwing much light on how the executed died and the executors lived

the story begins.

Apparently, German archaeologists have begun to systematically explore the human remains left behind where medieval cities used capital punishment to discipline their populace. The article describes the pioneer of this movement, Jost Auler, as the author or editor of multiple books on “execution archaeology”. He is quoted as saying that these sites were “just as much a part of the scenery as windmills.”  The article describes multiple examples of gallows in states of decay that have become the focus of this new archaeological specialty.

Obviously, to the extent that public executions were an integral part of social life in these towns, leaving them out of consideration makes for an incomplete vision of the past.

But at the same time, the story gave me pause.

I wondered how much this work– or at least the framing of it as a coherent movement within archaeology– is due to the popularity of the Hangman’s Daughter novels, published starting in 2008 by German author Oliver Pötzsch, whose books gain an aura of authenticity from his identification of a family history traced back to specialists in execution? We often talk about the popular culture of archaeology; there is somewhat less reflection on how popular culture might shape the practice of archaeology.

Is it possible to think about this newly self-conscious specialization from the same perspective that we might bring to bear when talking about the ethics and pragmatics of exhuming bodies in the cross-cutting disciplines of mortuary archaeology, bioarchaeology, and forensic anthropology– the topic of a seminar in which I took part last year at the School for Advanced Research, co-organized with Zoe Crossland?

We argued that in forensic anthropology, there are “responsibilities that exist because participants are working with the dead in relation to the living”, which foregrounds “the ‘personhood’ of the dead and the reciprocal shaping of the personhood of the living, including the anthropologist”.

We wrote that

contemporary forensic anthropologists are, by definition, working on evidence of the shared human capacity for violence, and yet there is potential for their findings to be framed as exceptional, or even insignificant, compared to a largely peaceful present. What the bioarchaeological perspective on violence brings to our discussions is a reminder that interpersonal violence is something that can be seen throughout human history.

Yet we did not fully come to terms with the special situation of archaeologists investigating the bodily remains of people who had been victims of state violence in the distant past– as if our forensic and bioarchaeological categories were somehow very separate.

I am particularly interested in how archaeologists think about past human subjects– what happens when the subjects are understood by the archaeologist to be criminals? Are the challenges like those faced by ethnographers dealing with unsympathetic subjects– who we can easily do injustice due to a lack of empathy?

And then there is the empirical question: how real is the claim that there is an emerging subfield of execution archaeology?

A quick search of Anthropology Plus, a database that includes a wide range of archaeological publications, produced a handful of articles starting in the late 1990s. An early, general contribution was a 1996 article in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology by Tony Waldron. Titled “Legalized Trauma”, it defined how one might recognize victims of execution.

The majority of the articles were based on German research, including work by Jost Auler, or concerned British medieval sites.

The circumstances that created sites like the German gallows hills described by Der Spiegel are bound to be historically specific. They may be shared in both of the medieval traditions that appear to explicitly concern execution sites, so that we might hope that the way the British publications treat these sites will also be reflected in the scholarly publications of German research.

There are apparently a large number of known and investigated sites from the Anglo-Saxon period in Britain. A Smithsonian.com magazine article published in 2010 mentioned in passing that

British archaeologists have discovered some 20 “execution cemeteries” across the country—testifying to a harsh penal code that claimed the lives of up to 3 percent of the male population.

In 2007, one such site, the Chesterton Lane Corner cemetery, was described in an article by Craig Cessford, Natasha Dodwell, Alison Dickens, and Andrew Reynolds. They framed their discussion in terms of “the relationship between justice and central places”, a focus that avoids my unease about possible sensationalism in focusing on the bodies of those killed through judicial violence.

Reynolds subsequently included the site in a more comprehensive discussion of crime and punishment in Anglo-Saxon Britain. In a broader article about secular power, taking a landscape approach, Reynolds describes what he characterizes as a “dynamic” judicial landscape in which the accused moved throughout a territory while being held and tried, finally going to execution sites on the boundaries of political territories. Reynolds was able to estimate the frequency of capital punishment at about once every ten years, giving a much less bloody impression than Der Spiegel’s account of the new German work. Still, Reynolds notes that an Anglo-Saxon moving from Old Sarum to Winchester

would have passed at least five places of execution, an average of one every 6km, leaving no doubt about the extent of royal power in the landscape…While one person may have read the message of the gallows as one of royal protection and a clear sign of the king’s concern for public security, others may equally have found the spectacle of heads on stakes and rotting corpses, potentially of children as young as 12, hanging from gallows an intimidating and depressing manifestation of an overbearing moralising state.

This seems just about the right way to confront what execution cemeteries have to tell us; acknowledging that they can serve as unequivocal archaeological signs of the exercise of power, but insisting on reflecting on the probable human impact of the carefully located exercise of mortal state violence.

There may not actually be an emerging subdiscipline of execution archaeology. But if there is, we can hope that it adopts this ethically troubled posture, avoiding becoming a kind of scientific analogue to the troubling exhibition of prepared human bodies (themselves notoriously derived from Chinese prisoners) that has become an accepted part of contemporary popular culture.

But you sure are making history.

That’s my gut reaction after being asked by BBC Radio to participate in a broadcast reacting to a news story published on the BBC website today.

Tagline: Rocky Horror Show writer Richard O’Brien thinks of himself as 70% male and 30% female

O’Brien– who actually uses the term “third sex” when describing himself– reports the not uncommon experience of feeling that he wanted to be more feminine. Many people identified by those around them as male have such senses of alienation, and it is no longer news when someone takes steps to move trans-gender. In O’Brien’s case, this involved starting to take estrogen hormone therapy, apparently about ten years ago. He reports

“It takes the edge off the masculine, testosterone-driven side of me and I like that very much. I think I’ve become a nicer person in some ways, slightly softer. For the first time in my life, I’ve started to put on a little bit of weight, which I like.”

Now, you have to imagine me on the phone trying to understand what makes this news, not having read the story. Here comes the ahah! moment: O’Brien, the BBC story notes, has no intention to have “sex reassignment” surgery; instead, he argues that people don’t come in just two kinds, and that sex should be thought of as a spectrum:

“It’s my belief that we are on a continuum between male and female. There are people who are hardwired male and there are people who are hardwired female, but most of us are on that continuum and I believe myself probably to be about 70% male, 30% female.”

The BBC had no problem finding support for the idea that sex is a spectrum, since that is actually quite uncontroversial among scholars studying sex and gender. Their authority, Melissa Hines, described as a professor of Psychology at Cambridge University, answered as I would: there are not just two distinct categorical sexes.

“I think that the research in this field suggests just the opposite. That there is not a gender binary, that there’s a range of gender, and there are many dimensions of gender and an individual person can be in a different position in terms of how masculine or feminine they are on each of these dimensions.”

Again, not controversial– 95 undergraduates in my current undergrad class could tell you this.

But O’Brien pushed this into focus in two important ways: first, by not being interested in being entirely redefined; and second, by (I think playfully) specifying that he is 70% male, 30% female.

Both of those statements push against the conservative strength of the two sex “correspondence” model, the dominant one throughout the 20th century in the US and much of Europe (although not everywhere else in the world, and not historically everywhere, including– notably– not historically in Europe).

That model has shown itself to be incredibly resilient in the face of the very real flexibility and fluidity of people’s experiences of themselves, and even denies the actual complexity and variability of biological sex, which can be categorical (e.g. if defined based on chromosomes), continuous (if we want to take something like sex hormones as a basis), but rarely actually binary (think of those chromosomal categories: people don’t just come in XX and XY). As developmental systems theory shows, biological sex is actually best understand as an emergent property that is shaped recursively by environment and biological systems of a diversity of kinds.

Not to mention that whatever else biological sex is, it does not precede social categories and discourses, and cannot serve as a solid, pre-cultural basis for a “real” identity. As scholars of sex/gender systems have long recognized, the attempt to create a differentiation between sex-as-biology and gender-as-cultural is nothing more than another attempt to entrench cultural discourses in some pre-existing reality.

So I have to disagree with another of the experts who the BBC says argues “that while people may feel not entirely male, or female, the reality is that they are born one or the other”:

“The distinction has to be made between gender and sex. Gender is very much a social construct, sex is biological. My guess would be that social notions of gender dictate how we behave.”

Yes, but that includes: how we recognize bodily differences as evidence of inherent embodied identities, which we then call sexes and try to say are already there in the flesh, when in fact they are our readings of the flesh. Sex is always labeled with words that are themselves products of cultural discourses. Languages (like English) that have only two words for sex force us to recognize only two sexes, and cultures (like the dominant ones in the US and Britain) that view two sexes as “natural” enforce adherence to one sex or the other. In the course of the 2oth century, the Anglo-American world came to understand that some people might be born with a sense of themselves that was other– but they still had to fit into one of two categories: a woman who felt herself to be “really” male’; a man who wanted, as O’Brien reports, to be a fairy princess.

But not something in between. Not a “third sex”. Not something that challenges the boundaries of categories; not something that suggests there might be more than two ways of being.

It is a little disappointing that O’Brien– having launched a real challenge to the either/or logic with his claim to be 70/30 (not 100% female trapped in a man’s body, not a male who needs to flip a switch) falls into the two-way trap. This comes immediately after he is quoted as saying he doesn’t want to complete a transition to a feminine body through surgery:

“I don’t want to pretend to be something that I’m not.”

While the interviewer’s question doesn’t appear, it is implicit: “Why wouldn’t you want to complete a process to re-identify your body with your interior self?” O’Brien offers an identification as a “third sex”– but he also still is stuck with the Anglo-American understanding that sexual identity is an inherent, internal essence– we don’t want to be something that we are not.

But by definition, we cannot be something we are not. We are always ourselves– but that self–contrary to what the rigidity of the two sex/two gender categorical model insists– is always unfolding.

Even the most conventional man or woman who imagines him- or her-self within the limits of the heterosexual male/female dyad is never always the same. We are born as infants who experience a world around us that offers us models and rules, that rewards us for being masculine and feminine in ways that vary in time, space, and context. Maturing bodies respond to changing levels of hormones but not all in the same way, and as the dramatic stories told by high profile cases like Olympic athletes show, sometimes in ways that expose the discordance between chromosomal and genital/reproductive sex. Insofar as being a mother is part of the underlying inherent essence of womanhood in the dominant two sex model, the many women who either cannot have children, or do not have children, certainly have both cultural and biological realities that are quite distinct from those of women who do engage in this form of sexual, embodied experience. While the marked nature of the female– seen as in need of definition in ways that the unmarked male body is not– has robbed us of any equally rich exploration of the changing sexuality of the male body that comes with maturation, sexual experience, aging, and the like, what little research exists shows that a heteronormative male body at 20 and the “same” body at 50 are vastly different. And it has become almost a truism to point out that post-menopausal women, in these cultures as in others, may be interpreted and experienced as different from the pre-menopausal body– and of course, may actually be different, biologically.

I wish I could end by saying that the BBC radio program responding to this took this as an opportunity to explore the challenge to inherent dualism in sex. Oddly, though, the program I was asked to consider– then politely told I was too “intellectual” to do– sees a very different take away point: doesn’t the idea of a gender spectrum challenge the basis of feminism?

My response– that this was incredibly old fashioned, already debunked by women of color who pointed out decades ago that to be female and white is not the same as being female and black– missed what I think was an opportunity to be even more direct. If feminism were the defense of the privilege of one category of people (women), presumably based on their having been oppressed by another category (men), then it wouldn’t have been, nor would it continue to be, revolutionary. Since feminism is instead the critique of oppression of people based on categorical aspects of being that serve to naturalize their disadvantage– of which unequal treatment of women in the two sex system is paradigmatic, although neither primary nor most extreme– of course, O’Brien is hardly a challenge.

He is, instead, a fellow traveler on the truest road: challenging the terms of engagement.

70% man; 30% woman; 100% human; and not to be reduced to a stereotype.

I saved the link to the original story in the New York Times back in late September 2012, thinking I would write something about it eventually. Although the story was a little short on details of the archaeology, it was enough to show that for once, the reporting was reporting what the archaeologists really said:

a University of Leicester archaeologist working in a trench cut into a parking lot… noted signature characteristics that pointed strongly to Richard: a deformed spine, what she has described as a mortal battlefield wound in the back of the skull from a bladed instrument and a barbed metal arrowhead found between two upper vertebrae.

The remains were buried in the choir, an area of the priory church where Franciscan monks would have sat during ceremonies, close to the altar. It was in the choir that one of the most credible contemporary accounts said Richard had been interred.

But that pointer proved moot when Henry VIII seized and ransacked the monasteries in 1538, leaving priories like Greyfriars to crumble into rubble, to the point where centuries later, nobody had any precise fix as to where they once stood.

That left the archaeologists to determine, using ground-penetrating radar, where the priory had been. Their big break came when it proved to be not under a 19th-century bank building where local legend and scholarship had placed it, but under the more accessible parking lot across the street.

That narrative piqued my interest. But as the story noted, the confirmation would depend on lab tests that would follow. Those are now in, and are spectacularly supportive of the identification.

The New York Times quoted geneticist Turi King’s account

DNA samples from two modern-day descendants of Richard III’s family had provided a match with samples taken from the skeleton found in the priory ruins. … the descendants’ mitochondrial DNA, a genetic element inherited through the maternal line of descent, matched that extracted from the parking lot skeleton. She said all three samples belonged to a type of mitochondrial DNA that is carried by only 1 to 2 percent of the English population, a rare enough group to satisfy the project team.

While press coverage has almost entirely emphasized Richard the singular historical person, I am delighted above all by the way the archaeologists involved controlled the story. They have produced what I think is the single best archaeology project website I have ever seen. Day by day accounts of the work; explanations of the analyses and what can be known from them; and even clarification that the original mention of a “barbed arrowhead” was wrong.

Even in the earliest press coverage the archaeologists involved managed to keep bringing up implications of the find:

Lin Foxhall, the chairwoman of Leicester University’s archaeological services department, said preliminary diagnosis of the curved spine pointed to a condition known as scoliosis, which often causes one shoulder to be raised higher than the other — exactly how contemporary accounts described Richard.

“It doesn’t fit with Tudor sources which portray Richard as a wicked hunchback,” Dr. Foxhall said … “There was a long history from Greco-Roman times onward of associating physical disability like spinal deformations with negative character traits, a belief that we explicitly do not share today….

“The individual we have discovered was obviously strong and active despite his disability.”

This kind of re-thinking of what human physical difference can mean has resonance for the contemporary world. It takes public enthusiasm about one famous (or infamous) person and demands we reflect on the population at large.

The Leicester team’s explanation of the genealogical work and the way transmission from mother to daughter over 18 generations was established also deserves applause. They add that while the work reported is on maternally transmitted DNA (mitochondrial DNA) it is also theoretically possible to trace DNA transmitted on the Y chromosome, through a line of men, although as they note, there is a drawback:

Male descent is often easier to trace in historical archives where the exploits of men are generally better documented than those of their wives and daughters, but suffers from one obvious potential pitfall. We can always be sure who someone’s mother was, but the identity of their ‘father’ and their genetic male parent do not always coincide, as Y-chromosome analysis can reveal. Genealogy is one area of research where a comment of “Bastard” is not always gratuitous swearing…

I love the clarity of the science and the humor both.

For me, the single most intriguing thing is something not really emphasized in the press, probably because it is one place where the story is a normal archaeological one: it’s complicated. That would be the matter of the radiocarbon dating of the remains.

The New York Times reports the date of death of the buried individual as “between 1455 and 1540″. The Leicester site steps us through the process of arriving at a date, starting with the raw lab results:

The SUERC results showed a 95% probability that the bone samples dated from around AD1430-1460, and over in Oxford the results both came out at around AD1412-1449, again with a 95% confidence.

Oh dear.

Oh dear indeed. Taken at face value, Richard III died before he reigned.

But there is an explanation, and it is my very favorite thing we have learned about Richard:

The proportion of C-14 in the atmosphere, and hence in living things… varies between the atmosphere and the oceans. Radiocarbon dating of marine organisms can be out by up to several hundred years, and this effect can occur to a lesser degree in terrestrial life where sea-food forms part of the diet.

The mass spectrometry of the Greyfriars bone samples reveals that the individual in question had a high-protein diet including a significant proportion of seafood.

In this one little comment we see the privilege of the nobility: access to food different than that enjoyed by most people.

On February 4th, I was asked to be part of a public radio panel about the identification of Richard III, along with someone described to me as a historian from Stanford, but actually a professor of English and Comparative Literature. On the program, the host leads by asking the Stanford professor what the significance of this find will be. The answer he received makes sense– it will have primarily commemorative value, bringing the one English ruler whose burial place was unknown into the light.

But in making that point, my colleague went further, and said it probably wouldn’t change what we know about Richard III. I am sure he was thinking, it doesn’t tell us if Richard killed his nephews or not, it doesn’t tell us if he was the malign figure Shakespeare represented.

But on behalf of archaeologists everywhere, I disagreed. We know that this man, who lived 500 years ago, ate considerable amounts of fish. Those telling details matter; not just because it allowed the radiocarbon dates to be corrected; but because it is a window into the everyday practices that made up his life, practices that are recorded, if no where else, in our bones.

And not just any kind of queen– the story opens

The suspected tomb and remains of a great Maya warrior queen have been discovered in Guatemala.

[emphasis added]

I am trying to be excited. I am trying not to be cranky. I should be happy. Why am I not happy?

Let’s start with this: queens are always treated as exceptions to the (assumed) rule. So finding the tomb of a queen doesn’t (necessarily) help in the vital task of taking apart the assumptions that make us see the past in general– and the Classic Maya past in particular– through a gendered lens in which women are normally subordinate to men.

So no matter how many Maya noble women’s tombs are identified, each one seems to be a surprise: finding a royal woman is always an exception, so the next royal woman isn’t seen as evidence of a category of powerful women, but another exception to the normal status of women as powerless.

Hence my failure to rejoice over coverage of this latest find. Citing the Nat Geo again:

The body inside was buried with … a small alabaster jar carved in the shape of a conch shell, out of which the carved head and arms of an old woman emerge.

Maya hieroglyphs on the back of the jar include the names “Lady Water Lily Hand” and “Lady Snake Lord,” according to the study team.

Both names are thought to refer to Lady K’abel, who governed the Wak kingdom for her family, the empire-building Kan, or “Snake,” dynasty, based in the Maya capital Calakmul in what’s now Mexico.

While Lady K’abel ruled with her husband, K’inich Bahlam, her title of Kaloomte, or “supreme warrior,” gave her higher authority than the king.

From the perspective of the National Geographic, the newsworthy thing here is not (just) that a royal tomb of a powerful woman was recovered; it is that this woman was surprisingly powerful– more powerful than her male spouse.

But dynastic marriage patterns, in which powerful families sealed alliances by marrying off young women to less powerful ruling families at other sites, virtually demand that we expect many sites to yield evidence of noble or ruling women whose status might be higher than that of their local spouse.

We should be long past the time that it would surprise us that there were powerful women in Maya dynasties. Even a cursory search uncovers story after story of royal tombs whose occupants turned out to be women. The Red Queen at Palenque and the occupant of the Margarita Tomb at Copan are two of the most visible examples. Yet again, Archaeology magazine’s online story about the occupant of the Copan tomb begins with the line “Archaeologists excavating the richest tomb ever found at the ancient Maya city of Copán in Honduras were surprised to discover that its occupant was a woman”.

But these royal women are in very good– and abundant– company.

Just about a year ago, the National Geographic reported on a royal woman from a tomb at Nakum, Guatemala. The lead archaeologist is quoted saying that the “royal figure’s gender also took the researchers by surprise”:

“It’s surprising to me—we were expecting a male,”… While other nearby cities had turned up some evidence of female rulers, Maya queens were uncommon compared to kings, he explained.

A second, less well preserved burial, later than the one securely identified as a royal woman, was also described as possibly that of a woman, based on the small size of a finger ring in the tomb.

A similar instance of two burials of women was discussed by Karen Olsen Bruhns and Karen Stothert in 1999. The more recent burial in the pair was identified as likely sacrificed as part of the funeral rituals for the first buried woman. They described the first, Burial 128 at Altar de Sacrificios, in Guatemala, as “far more lavish than any other person buried at Altar de Sacrificios”. They argued that discussions of burials at the site, which compared the aggregate of men’s burials to the aggregate of women’s burials, gave a false picture. By asserting that men (in general) received more attention in burial than women (in general), these arguments of male/female status managed to skip over the fact that the single most impressive burial was that of a woman.

The tendency to lump all women together into a single category, and contrast it with all men, breaks down entirely when confronted with the rich singularity of examples of burials like those of Maya queens. I would be delighted if these individual unique burials were used, as they clearly should be, to challenge any assumption that there actually was such a thing as (uniform) “women’s status” in Classic Maya society. The woman in Burial 128 at Altar de Sacrificios had nothing of social significance in common with the young woman killed to accompany her in death.

The people in these two burials were both women, yes: but what it meant to be a woman who commanded, or who served, were very different things. Archaeologist Christine White has demonstrated that gendered dietary differences varied in different times and places across the Maya area, often demonstrating distinctions between nobles and commoners in kind and degree of gender difference.

So when we read that the Red Queen from Palenque was “uncharacteristically tall for the female population of her region and times”, we might want to ask why we would expect a powerful noble woman to resemble women of less powerful families?

The new tomb from El Peru is identified tentatively as that of the woman named on the small alabaster vessel–a conclusion that seems plausible, although sometimes such objects in tombs are heirlooms or gifts to other people. This particular woman is quite well known already from her depiction in astonishing carved stone monuments like El Perú Stela 34, looted from the site, cut into pieces, and now reassembled in the Cleveland Museum of Art. There, she wears a round shield on one arm, and holds ritual regalia in the other, in a pose identical to that of a male noble on a paired stela, now in the Kimbell Museum in Fort Worth, Texas.

Finding her tomb may have been serendipity.

But the fact that there were women powerful enough to be buried with the greatest degree of celebration possible in the Classic Maya world should no longer come as a surprise.

Images of the newly publicized recovered murals can be seen in a post on the National Geographic website.

One of the archaeologists quoted suggests the images may show a colonial dance, possibly a “conquest dance” (Danza de la Conquista) commemorating the Spanish invasion and conversion of the Maya to Christianity.

But there is nothing in the murals that parallels known versions of these dances. And the study of indigenous dance-drama actually provides a better candidate for a dance important enough to the residents of Chajul to merit being commemorated in painted murals inside a dwelling. Unfortunately, the dance held in Chajul well into mid-century is no longer practiced, and older sources on it are somewhat fragmentary.

Chajul’s dance is discussed in a long modern study of the Rabinal Achi, translated by Dennis Tedlock from Maya texts transcribed in the 19th century. In this dance-drama from the town of Rabinal, a character called called “Cawek of the Forest People” mentions Chajul in a first person narrative passage:

I am the brave

I am the man

of the lord of foreign Cunén

foreign Chajul

Tedlock describes the Rabinal Achi as a specific instance of a more widely practiced “Dance of the Trumpets”. He draws attention to links between the kind of musical instruments employed in the Rabinal Achi and in other dances in the same region of western Guatemala: always a wooden slit drum, and in some places– including Chajul–  trumpets, successors of those made of wood represented long before in Maya Classic period art at Bonampak.

The version of this dance at Chajul was known as the Baile de las Canastas [dance of the baskets].

Multiple figures in the newly published murals have a rectangular device at one side, with something like the image of a bird on it. The best preserved examples make it clear that these devices were attached to the costume, suspended in back. These are recognizably the kind of structures Tedlock means when he talks about backpacks.

Henrietta Yurchenko, who recorded a performance at Chajul in 1945, described objects worn by dancers there that Tedlock identified as “backpacks” as the baskets for which the Chajul dance was named, representations of “hunters’ baskets used to catch birds”.

The colonial images from Chajul published by the National Geographic offer other suggestive hints of a possible identity with the Baile de las Canastas. Figures wearing Spanish-style clothing featured on one wall are described as playing a drum, a constant feature of these related dances, and a flute.

Facing the drummer is the first of a series of costumed figures that continue around the corner onto the adjacent wall. They wear Spanish-style boots, but otherwise are dressed in costumes featuring bird helmets. Oyeb, the protagonist in the Chajul Baile de las Canastas, was described in 1945 as able to take the form of a quetzal bird or a tzunun, a hummingbird.

The Chajul dance performed in 1945 included a series of incidents ending in the death of Oyeb, who is shot by a hunter as a quetzal, rescued by the hunter’s daughter, and impregnates her. Tedlock says her father hires a ritual specialist whose prayers defeat Oyeb.

All of the dances described by Tedlock as related to the Rabinal Achi feature themes related to birds. An alternative name for the Baile de Canastas of Chajul is actually Baile del Gorrion (translated as “dance of the sparrow” rather than “hummingbird”).  Oyeb can transform himself into a hummingbird. The costumed figures in the new murals wear helmets that could be interpreted as quetzal heads, and carry baskets showing the outline of a bird.

When were the murals uncovered at Chajul painted? Who would have lived in the house where they appear?

The researchers who reported the murals compare them to the style of manuscripts from the 17th to 18th centuries, and suggest the building they are in is “at least” 300 years old– in other words, dating around 1700 as well.

The Rabinal Achi and related dances were targeted for suppression in colonial Guatemala. Orders against them were issued, Tedlock says, starting in 1593 and continuing until 1770. While these were clearly not successful, they should have led practitioners of these dances to be careful about publicizing them– including, one would imagine, taking care about painting images from similar dances on a house wall.

But Chajul was, for much of its colonial history, under somewhat less colonial scrutiny and control than other places in the Guatemalan highlands.

An article by geographer George Lovell, published in 2008, says that in the 1540s, the population living in dispersed hamlets was resettled in centralized towns, congregations, under the auspices of missionary orders. Lovell quotes the account of Antonio de Remesal, around 1615, who described the congregation at Chajul as one of those accomplished by the Dominican order.

In newly congregated  Chajul, two segments of the town formed from what had previously been independent hamlets continued to have recognized independent identity, and paid tribute separately from 1664 to 1678. The people brought into Chajul already were moving out of the centralized town into a new dispersed pattern by 1579.

Ultimately, the majority of the population moved back out into the landscape. This makes it likely that the residents of any house continuously occupied since around 1700 were among those most deeply engaged in local administration.

A response to a Spanish government questionnaire dated 1771, from the priest of neighboring Nebaj (who was responsible for ministering to the religious needs of Chajul on periodic visits) helps fill in the picture of the community during the period when these murals may have been painted and visible.

The population of Chajul in 1771 was 1081 people. That made it a relatively large town, one able to support a rich ceremonial life.

The priest reported that San Gaspar de Chajul hosted four cofradias and two other “brotherhoods” (hermandades). These were community organizations, headed by people in the town, with roots in medieval European mutual aid societies that brought people together in devotion to a particular saint.

By the late 18th century, such groups provided a way for segments of indigenous towns like Chajul to accumulate and manage joint property. The members held celebrations on the feast of a specific saint, using images they controlled and cared for.

While some ceremonies took place in the church, under the nominal control of the Catholic hierarchy, others took place in the houses or yards of members of the cofradias. These included performances of dance dramas: Sergio Navarrette Pellicer, in a study of music in Rabinal, notes that the Rabinal Achí there was performed during cofradia ceremonies.

A residence adorned with murals of dances in colonial Chajul would likely have been occupied by a family that was part of one of the major cofradias, patrons of a public performance of dances like the Baile de las Canastas.

In 1771, the priest of Nebaj reported that there were three saints venerated by cofradias: Santa Cruz (May 3), San Salvador (August 6), and San Pedro (June 29). These feasts were distinct from the celebration of the patron saint of the town itself, San Gaspar, one of the three kings, on January 6.

Particular importance may have pertained to the feast of Santa Cruz, since the priest in 1771 reported that there were separate cofradias for men and women honoring Santa Cruz. A notable feature of cofradias was the participation of women as sponsors of and participants in feasts along with men.

The priest of Nebaj also reported the existence of two hermandades (brotherhoods) at Chajul in 1771.

María Lucía Soto Mayor explains that hermandades were nascent cofradías, formed as new participants joined the original devotee of a saint. Both of the hermandades in Chajul in 1771 were dedicated to saints then gaining popularity, the Virgin of Guadelupe and “Jesús”,  most likely the predecessor of the Black Christ of Chajul.

Veneration of the Cristo Negro of Esquipulas, in eastern Guatemala, had been strengthened in 1735 by devotion from a priest who subsequently became the bishop of Guatemala. A major church at Esquipulas was completed in 1759. The cult of Christ of Esquipulas reached as far north as New Mexico by the beginning of the nineteenth century.

Similarly, the Virgin of Guadalupe gained popularity in the mid- to late- eighteenth century. Historian William Taylor argues that devotion to Guadalupe spread beyond Mexico City during the years between 1733 and 1756.

Leaders of cofradias (and hermandades) would have been patrons of dances performed at fiestas for the saints they venerated. Their participation in cofradias would have continued over their lives, while civil leaders of indigenous pueblos were elected for terms, and rotated in and out of office. It was cofradias that integrated leadership in religious festivals in everyday life.

While specific historical research on Chajul needs to be carried out, there is already a good case to be made for locating the murals uncovered in a residence in the town in the purview of participants in these voluntary associations, which became so troublesome for the Spanish authorities that they were the focus of efforts to limit their scope beginning in the 1770s.

We can imagine residents of a leading household in Chajul deciding to cover the murals of the dances up during this period of new surveillance and redefinition of cofradias, and the degree of historical memory they provided in everyday life.

Almost. But then I think about the lives that have been damaged by their insistence on sorting out who “really” is female, and who is not.

Beginning in 1968 the International Olympics Committee required individuals seeking to compete in women’s events to prove “their femininity or female gender”, and if questions were raised, chromosomal analysis was to resolve uncertainties.

The policy drew critical attention from the medical and legal professions.

Law scholars noted that the requirement that only female athletes undergo testing violated expectations of equal treatment of men and women.

This is not entirely surprising: there is a long history of the Olympics treating women competitors as a suspect category. In a previous blog post, I discussed the work of Norwegian historian Kerstin Bornholdt, who examined the unfounded fears that women’s bodies would be harmed that led to the elimination of women’s competition in the 800 meter race in 1928, not resumed until 1960.

The most predictable problems resulting from the IOC’s 1968 policy were biomedical: chromosomal testing did not solve the “problem” of identifying “real” women. Anne Fausto Sterling starts her landmark book, Sexing the Body, with the story of one of the failures: Maria Patiño, a Spanish hurdler, tested as having a Y-chromosome. Despite the fact that she had lived all her life as a woman, and externally showed no signs of maleness, she was disqualified to compete as a woman.

By 1999, the IOC abandoned their original attempt to enforce the chromosomal identification of femininity. As a story about the current Olympics in the Los Angeles Times describes the history,

The International Olympic Committee has struggled … variously using hair patterns, chromosomes, individual genes and other factors in their long-running attempts to distinguish men from women. All of these tests have been discarded.

Notice the wording: although the LA Times story is actually fairly good on the science, it manages to sort of miss the point. The IOC has not been trying to “distinguish men from women”: it has been policing who counts as a woman. If it were trying to distinguish men from women, we might expect testing of both self-identified sexes.

The latest approach from the IOC makes crystal clear that it is only the ambiguity of women participating in competitive athletics that concerns them. This year, they want to assess femininity on the basis of hormone levels.

If you have testosterone readings in a range the IOC defines as typical of males, you cannot compete as a woman.

Sounds more fair, right? after all, everyone knows that testosterone helps athletic performance.

Except for one thing: as the LA Times reports, the scientific evidence is actually unclear. Most research on the effects of these hormones has been done on men, not women, and the research that does exist does not support the idea that hormone levels accompany better athletic performance:

Many women with androgen insensitivity [which prevents testosterone from being used] have competed in the Olympics, and “the idea that testosterone is a necessary ingredient for elite athletic performance is really undermined by these cases,” Van Anders said.

In fact, androgen insensitivity is overrepresented among female athletes, Vilain added: The general population has an incidence of 1 in 20,000, but for Olympic athletes it is about 1 in 400. No one knows why.

Want more? it turns out that successful male athletes don’t always have higher testosterone levels, either. The Global Post reports that a study by Allan Mazur of Syracuse University of male Olympic athletes

found that more than 25 percent had testosterone levels below the “normal” male range.

All of which should suggest that the IOC is embarking on another failed attempt to regulate sex.

A new article in the American Journal of Bioethics calls on the IOC to stop trying to define gender biologically, and to let people compete in whichever division their legally recognized sex would indicate.

Medical anthropologist Katrina Karkazis, the lead author, is quoted in the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel as saying

“What makes sex testing so complicated is that there is no one marker in the body we can use to say, ‘This is a man,’ or ‘This is a woman,’ …These new policies try to get around that complexity by singling out  testosterone levels as the most important aspect of athletic advantage. But what causes athletic advantage is equally complex and cannot be reduced to testosterone levels.”

The American Journal of Bioethics article makes the point clearly that there are many different ways sex is assigned, they do not coincide, and they do not map onto a single binary of male and female:

Sex is commonly thought to be straightforward, consisting of two clear categories of male and female. Yet there are at least six markers of sex—including chromosomes, gonads, hormones, secondary sex characteristics, external genitalia, and internal genitalia—and none of these are binary.

Writing in The New York Times, Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katina Karkazis, lead authors, make a number of provocative and timely arguments.

Like legal scholars did after the 1968 initiation of chromosomal sex testing, they note that these policies are inequitable:

Sex testing of female athletes will always be discriminatory. Under the new policy, men will most likely continue to enjoy freedom from scrutiny, even though they, too, have greatly varying testosterone levels, along with other variations in natural attributes that affect athletic performance.

As did Kerstin Bornholdt, they call out the ideology of protecting women involved:

Sex tests are based on the notion that fair competition requires “protecting” female athletes. Protection has been the cloak that covers all manner of sex discrimination, and it is seldom, if ever, the best way to advance equality.

They point out that the modern history shows that the people identified as not fitting the IOC model of femininity are not automatically more successful in competition; they are not actually “superwomen”:

What are these tests protecting women from? Men infiltrating women’s competitions? A century of monitoring competitions for sex fraud says no. Will superwomen crowd out other athletes? No again. Women who have been ensnared by sex-testing dragnets have often been impressive, but not out of line with other elite female athletes.

Most intriguing is their suggested solution, which is to stop automatically structuring athletic competition by a sex binary:

If the goal is instead to group athletes so that everyone has a chance to play, to excel and — yes — to win, then sex-segregated competition is just one of many possible options, and in many cases it might not be the best one.

Sex segregation is probably a good idea in some sports, at some levels and at some moments. But it is time to refocus policy discussions at every level so that sex segregation is one means to achieve fairness, not the ultimate goal. Ensuring gender equity through access to opportunity is just as important.

[emphasis added]

This point may not be immediately obvious to readers. What they are saying is that in some sports, people of different sexual makeup may be able to compete in a mixed group without automatically having achievement stratify by sex. Instead of beginning with the assumption that women are weaker and categorically unable to reach high levels of achievement, this should be assessed for each kind of athletic competition. And they are– I think quite rightly– linking sex segregation to lower access to athletics for the sex presumed to have less interest: women.

What more could I want? I still wish we could figure out how, in the national media debate, to hammer home the point they make, that “there are at least six markers of sex…and none of these are binary”. For me, that is why the Olympics insistence on assessing women for their adherence to a presumed dichotomous norm is most distressing. There is no “third gender/third sex” division in the Olympics. Either you compete as a male or a female.

But that is not what the very markers of biological sex that the IOC keeps trying to use are telling us. People don’t come in two and only two kinds.

Wouldn’t it be nice if that could get across to people through the very visibility of the athletic competition that has, for so long, tried to pretend otherwise?

[A version of some of the above was posted at What Makes Us Human on Psychology Today under the title "Are you a boy, or are you a girl?". This version reflects further, and more careful, thinking about the rhetoric of the news coverage.]

The rich dude gets the hot chick even in prehistory.

Thus a perceptive reader commenting on Wired Science’s coverage of newly published research on the roots of inequality in Neolithic Europe sums up the whole story.

More soberly, the BBC News emphasizes the contingency of the new findings in its story, titled Cardiff uni claims evidence of Stone Age ‘inequality’.

You can be forgiven if this story does not ring a bell, since as of today, it has not gotten the widespread coverage in US media that one would normally expect of an archaeological science story making big claims, based on publication in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Not that the new findings lack contemporary relevance; as Michael Balter wrote in the AAAS-sponsored blog Science Now,

Even the most democratic societies are rife with social and economic inequalities, as the current tension between the poorer “99%” and the richest “1%” vividly illustrates. But just how early in human events such social hierarchies became entrenched has been a matter of debate. A new study of skeletons from prehistoric farming communities across Europe suggests that hereditary inequality was an early feature, going back more than 7000 years ago.

(This is what Wired reposted, under the original headline Occupy the Neolithic, drawing the reader comment above.)

The new research analyzed the ratios of different isotopes of strontium recovered from teeth enamel in over 300 burials in European archaeological sites dating between 5400 and 4900 BC– a period called the Linearbandkeramik (usually just abbreviated LBK, named for the geometric banded decoration of typical pottery used).

The core question that is addressed in PNAS, by a team led by Alexander Bentley of the University of Bristol is, interestingly, not framed either in terms of inequality or hierarchy– gendered or otherwise. Here’s their abstract:

Community differentiation is a fundamental topic of the social sciences, and its prehistoric origins in Europe are typically assumed to lie among the complex, densely populated societies that developed millennia after their Neolithic predecessors. Here we present the earliest, statistically significant evidence for such differentiation among the first farmers of Neolithic Europe. By using strontium isotopic data from more than 300 early Neolithic human skeletons, we find significantly less variance in geographic signatures among males than we find among females, and less variance among burials with ground stone adzes than burials without such adzes. From this, in context with other available evidence, we infer differential land use in early Neolithic central Europe within a patrilocal kinship system.

Where these researchers talk cautiously about “community differentiation”, specifically in land use and mobility, and infer patrilocal residence (which, any anthropologist will tell you, is distinct from patrilineality, patriarchy, or gender hierarchy), the press coverage goes right to the more resonant inequality and hierarchy– the 1% vs. the 99% of Balter’s post.

Bentley makes the connection between differential access to land and inequality more explicit in statements in a University of Bristol press release:

“Our results, along with archaeobotanical studies that indicate the earliest farmers of Neolithic Germany had a system of land tenure, suggest that the origins of differential access to land can be traced back to an early part of the Neolithic era…

“It seems the Neolithic era introduced heritable property (land and livestock) into Europe and that wealth inequality got underway when this happened.”

As Bentley and his colleagues emphasize in their research article, current understanding of the LBK people already suggests this was the period when land first became an object of possession and control in Europe. It has even been suggested that conflict between the newly arrived LBK people and residents already in place, hunter-gatherers following Mesolithic traditions, grew to open violence. Other researchers question this. Re-examination of fragmented skeletal remains from some LBK sites led to their reinterpretation as evidence of rituals, not warfare.

What seems unquestionable, however, is that the new LBK people used the landscape very differently. Very creative research that traced the harder-to-see mobile Mesolithic occupants of Europe at the time of the first LBK settlements found that

people of the LBK settled in exactly those areas only marginally exploited by hunter–gatherers and not in the intermediate regions with similar physiography but more intense hunter–gatherer exploitation.

Bart Vanmonfort, author of this article, concludes that

During the 6th Millennium cal BC, major parts of the loess region are exploited by a low density of hunter–gatherers. The LBK communities settle at arrival in locations fitting their preferred physical characteristics, but void of hunter–gatherer activity… in general the arrival of the LBK did not attract hunter–gatherer hunting activity. Their presence rather restrained native activity to regions located farther away from the newly constructed settlements…

It is the preference for regions of loess by the LBK farmers, which Vanmonfort shows were mostly not of interest to earlier residents, that underpins the new research. Stable residence in childhood on loess lands, the best for agriculture, is interpreted as evidence for control of those better soils, providing a basis for some groups to produce greater wealth than others.

Due to variation in geological sources of soils, strontium isotope ratios vary across the landscape. Strontium is incorporated in the bones and teeth through diet. Teeth in particular are useful, because unlike bone– which constantly is being remodeled, giving a picture of recent location of the person– teeth enamel is formed in childhood and retains the isotope ratios of the time it was formed. So, teeth give us a way to understand where a person grew up.

The current study begins with burials from seven different cemeteries of early LBK settlements. It evaluates the strontium isotope ratios of individuals in the cemeteries. Rather than try to match strontium isotope ratios to soil ratios, which for a variety of reasons would be difficult or theoretically questionable, it compares individuals in each cemetery. If everyone buried in a particular cemetery had similar access to loess land, or to food grown on loess land, there should be no statistically significant differences within the cemetery.

Bentley and his colleagues divided the population first by sex, since there have been suggestions that LBK farmers were patrilineal. They further subdivided the male population into two groups for analysis: men buried with stone adzes, and those without these tools.

Those males buried with adzes showed less variability in strontium isotope ratios than the other males. The males with adzes almost all had strontium ratios suggesting they grew up on the best agricultural soils. The females tested showed greater diversity in strontium ratios than the males overall.

The researchers conclude that males with the most access to the expensive adzes formed a core group that also had the least variable diet (in childhood, remember) suggesting their families were situated in stable positions and able to exploit the best agricultural land.

Nothing much here about gender, right? That comes from comparing the males as a group to the females as a group.

As the BBC story puts it:

strontium isotope analysis also reveals that early Neolithic women were more likely than men to have originated from areas outside those where their bodies were found.

Researchers think “this is a strong indication of patrilocality, a male-centred kinship system where females move to reside in the location of the males when they marry.”

OK; but there are a few things that should give us pause here.

Bentley and colleagues describe their rationale for analyzing the burials with adzes separately:

Found more often with males, this labor-intensive artifact is one of the most distinctive of the LBK. Fashioned from raw stone often exchanged over hundreds of kilometers and requiring a long preparation process, LBK adzes seem to have conveyed social, or even status, differences.

Notice that phrase “more often with males”. Julian Thomas, in his book Time, Culture, and Identity, has this to say about LBK adzes and sex:

At Sonderhausen, adzes were found exclusively with male burials, while at Aiterhofen, adzes were only predominately in male graves. However, at Nitra adzes were found with a number of female burials. (p. 112)

In other words, while there may be a tendency at the level of the entire continent, at the level of the individual village community, there was variability between villages.

The same is true in the new study by Bentley and colleagues.

At five of the seven sites (including Nitra, where Thomas notes adzes were found with a number of female burials) there was greater variability in strontium isotope ratios among females than among males, suggesting that the men of these communities enjoyed more consistent geographic location during their childhood, when their teeth enamel was forming.

At Aiterhofen, the trend was the same, but it did not reach the level of statistical significance– that is, while females showed evidence of more diverse origins, reflected in strontium isotope diversity, this was not as strongly a sex-related pattern. Combined with Thomas’ remarks that at Aiterhofen adzes were “only predominately” found with males, this suggests something distinctive was going on there.

Finally, at one site– Ensisheim– Bentley and colleagues found that variation in strontium isotopes was higher among males than among females.

If we accept that these patterns of mobility are proxies for kinship, this means not all LBK villages in this study are adequately described as patrilocal. Indeed, the data showing that some males were more mobile also isn’t explained well by a simple patrilocal model.

So much for kinship. What about inequality– the “rich dude” of the comment with which I opened?

The researchers used a proxy for wealth: inclusion of adzes in burials. They limit their analysis to males found with adzes, even though about 5% of those buried with adzes were females.

Of 62 adze burials, they tell us, only one had strontium isotope ratios that suggested a difference from the group of individuals who grew up on loess soils.

The 59 males with adzes, we are told, had significantly less variable strontium isotope ratios than the males buried without adzes.

What we do not get is any discussion of the strontium isotope ratios of the three women buried with adzes (indicated by red filled circles in their Figure 2 and Figure 3A). Visual inspection suggests these women are not strikingly different from the group of males considered to have relatively consistent isotope signatures indicative of privileged access to loess land, since they occur scattered among or just adjacent to the filled blue triangles that stand for the males buried with adzes.

This actually is entirely consistent with the basic argument that some families had privileged access to the best agricultural land. Families are, after all, composed of offspring of both sexes. In any study tracking early diet of families with privileged access to the best farmland, I would expect there to be boys and girls who benefited from their family’s privileged status.

As young men and women went through life, I would expect some of both to be accorded recognition, even if they were the exceptions to common practice. To the extent that adzes were symbolically charged, and not just someone’s personal property, we should not be surprised to find them deployed with people of different sexes than is common, and should not collapse those distinctive persons into a category that we take for granted as natural or primary.

Archaeologists struggle with a legacy of nineteenth and twentieth century anthropological thought that took “cultures” as the focus of analysis. Even though we actually know that human organization takes place at the level of populations, which can be of different scales (networks of families or villages, in this case), that legacy encourages us to think of an entire regional distribution of people as having some set of shared characteristics, the “culture”. Among the things we tend to assume cultures share are kinship “systems”, even though in anthropology, we long ago recognized that the systems were ours– and that kinship results from practices patterned over generations, often if not always with some degree of variability.

Variability in life in LBK villages, and in the strategies employed by individual LBK families, is wonderfully evident in new studies like this. The question is, can we reshape our old concepts to let us see what life was like outside the prisms of our traditional models?

Or to put it another way: will we always simply confirm that “the rich dude gets the hot chick even in prehistory“?

But what caught my attention was this sentence:

The tablet revealed the names of  60 women – probably prisoners-of-war  or victims of an Assyrian forced population transfer programme.

I have to admit that, despite decades of work in archaeology, I still find the idea that we can (sometimes) identify named people amazing. The sense of connection that entails is extraordinary, even though I know that “names” recorded in documents are often not what people were called in everyday life. Names aren’t stable, or even singular. Sometimes, they aren’t even names, but actually titles that we either misrecognize or simply use out of a sense of convenience. But they entail a kind of connection that is of a different order than the categorical invocation of “women” does.

The actual research paper on the tablet, published in the Journal of Near Eastern Studies, is short, technical, and very carefully argued. The full article is only available to subscribers. Anyone can see a preview of the first page.

It reports on one cuneiform tablet from a building identified as the Governor’s Palace in Tushhan, along the Tigris river in modern Turkey. Dating to the Neo-Assyrian period– when different sources agree that an Assyrian empire was consolidated between 745 and 612 BCE– the building is understood to have served as the administrative center of Neo-Assyrian controlled Tushhan, today the archaeological site of Ziyaret Tepe. (Archaeologist Tim Matney has done a fabulous job giving an overview of the site and the work of the team in his 2011 blog.)

The new article describes the text preserved on a burned tablet recovered in the throne room of the palace. Here’s how the author, John MacGinnis, described the content:

The tablet lists women who must have been under the authority of the palace administration. The women are listed either by name or by an entry stating how many are assigned to specific villages, or to the granary, or those at the disposal of named supervisors; three are recorded as having died. The total number of women available to the administration is apparently 144.

Press coverage has followed the article in emphasizing its importance as evidence for a previously unrecognized language provided by the names.

At the same time, the text, as translated by MacGinnis, also gives tantalizing hints of the life of women under the control of the empire.

The way the names are introduced, MacGinnis notes, is “characteristic of lists of deportees” moved by the empire from one area to another. Some of the women named are accompanied by their sons. While he considers other models for the possible origin of the population of women (prisoners of war, or locals under palace control), he leans toward seeing them as a deported population from present-day western Iran, writing

this strikes me as particularly plausible as it is certain that the Assyrians deported populations from Iran to other parts of the empire.

If that is the case, what was life like for these women– for Impane and her son, for Irsakina and Atude and all the rest?

News coverage fills out the gaps in the original article with what seem like poorly grounded stereotypes, in some cases actually contradicting what MacGinnis wrote.

Britain’s New Scientist starts its coverage with an empathetic invocation of how it might have felt to be deported from a homeland, left with no connection to your mother tongue beyond your name. But in fact, according to MacGinnis there were at least 45 women with names from this likely unknown language– which might suggest something more like a foreign enclave, able to speak the home language among themselves (and possibly maintain a degree of private conversation that would otherwise be impossible).

While the New Scientist blog imagines that the deported women all worked in the palace, the cuneiform text actually describes many as assigned to different work sites, at least four villages under the authority of the government of Tushhan.

The Independent gets that point right, mentioning that some of the women were assigned to specific villages. It imagines them

almost certainly being deployed by the palace authorities for some economic purpose (potentially a female-associated craft activity like weaving).

That is nicely concrete, but also curiously unsupported by the reports of the actual archaeological project, or by studies of Neo-Assyrian gendered activities.

A 2011 article in the journal Anatolica briefly discusses this particular cuneiform tablet (ZTT30) and describes it as a listing of agricultural workers.

The website for the project describes a previously transcribed and translated cache of cuneiform tablets from another administrative building, tentatively associated with an as-yet unidentified temple to the goddess Ishtar. Receipts for grain are prominent here.

The 2011 article mentions loom weights in its discussion of this building. A 2003 Anatolica article describes one of the tablets found there as “a witnessed list of textiles”, reinforcing the possibility that textiles were either produced or collected there.

But this is not the location of the newly published tablet naming 45 women in an unknown language. The temple of Ishtar is unlikely to have been the administrative entity that would have controlled the women listed in this tablet from the governor’s archive.

It doesn’t appear that the project discusses weaving at all in the blog of the 2011 field season. Nor for that matter, do they discuss any specialist craft production in any of the materials I have reviewed, although Lynn Rainville has conducted studies of micro-debris that she tantalizingly says “provide information about domestic technologies, craft specialization, and household activities” at the site.

The one explicit site of work mentioned in the cuneiform tablet text is a granary, where three women were assigned.

With these details in mind, we can begin to reconsider how women figured in the administrative world of the Neo-Assyrian empire. Two studies from the University of Helsinki help address this question. In 2005, Saana Teppo wrote a thesis on Neo-Assyrian women’s lives and agency. Her 2012 doctoral dissertation (under the name Saana Svärd), Power and Women in the Neo-Assyrian Palaces, pursues the topic in further depth.

On her website, Saana Svärd summarizes the life of women associated with the palaces, which she notes were far-flung economic institutions:

The royal palaces had many kinds of female residents. In addition to the queen and king, there were female musicians, weavers, cooks and maids residing and working in the palaces. Most of the high-ranking women led active lives, also in economic terms. Many were also highly educated: they could read and write, and corresponded with the learned men of the Assyrian empire.

If any of the women named on the newly translated tablet worked in the governor’s palace itself, they were likely to have done so in the support roles Svärd lists here: as “weavers, cooks and maids”. Based on her research, we can probably dismiss the possibility that the women named on the newly published tablet were weavers.

In her doctoral dissertation, Svärd discusses evidence for textile production within both royal palaces and provincial locations referred to by the phrase bet isati, “house of women”. Tushhan is one of the provincial locations with a bet isati. Svärd mentions two texts recording deliveries of grain to the “house of women” there. Another text from Tushhan mentions a high-ranking woman’s title that Svärd demonstrates was most likely that of a female administrator who was in charge of the queen’s households. Again, she is described as receiving grain.

Svärd suggests, based on these texts and similar ones from other locations in the Neo-Assyrian empire, that there were specific households headed by noted female administrators in at least some provincial capitals, made up primarily of women laboring under the supervision of these proxies for the queen. The small group of texts from Tushhan don’t provide evidence for weaving as a concern of the “house of women” there. In other instances where women were weavers in palace contexts, they are explicitly identified with that professional title.

In any event the “house of women” in Tushhan was unlikely to have been located in what today is identified as the governor’s palace. We are left to conclude that the women listed on the newly translated tablet from Tushhan were not weavers, not special workers under the direction of a female administrator, but most likely– as their assignment to outlying villages and to the granary in Tushhan itself suggest– basic laborers.

Which does not mean they were unimportant. The emphasis in the Tushhan texts to date on the receipt and storage of grain suggest that agricultural production was critical here. While uprooted and translated to a place not their own, the women named in these texts were participants in the core work of the Neo-Assyrian empire. And that raises a few, final, questions about the ability to influence their own lives and the society in which they came to live.

Svärd provides a particularly sophisticated analysis of women’s power in the Neo-Assyrian empire, drawing on contemporary concepts of heterarchy, defined by Carole Crumley as

the relation of elements to one another when they are unranked or when they possess the potential for being ranked in a number of different ways.

Heterarchy is actually very familiar in practice, although too often archaeologists emphasize simple hierarchies to the exclusion of considering the cross-cutting rankings within any society. For example, someone with political office may have no authority in a religious setting, and vice-versa, in a specific time and place. The two different rankings we might come up with by tracing religious authority and political authority in such a society would be a partial depiction of a heterarchy, even though each might be represented as a hierarchy on their own.

Heterarchy really comes into its own when we add consideration of less recognized exercises of power, such as those that might come with skill (the authority of an experienced weaver, potter, of cook acknowledged by those learning from or working with her) or with family position (the accepted authority of elders in family matters, or of mothers or fathers in some specific domain of family life).

Svärd shows that women with active roles recorded in texts either explicitly (embodied in letters, legal cases, and economic transactions) or implicitly (through their naming as professionals) can be understood as having agency, or exercising power, in a Neo-Assyrian empire seen as heterarchical: with temples and palaces occupying distinct hierarchies, with skill authority asserted by craft specialists and family authority exercised in marriage contracts for dependents.

She stops short of following the feminist archaeological arguments for exercise of a degree of control over life by even those in what might appear to be the least powerful positions. The women named in the new Tushhan text would seem to be completely without power: moved from their homeland and allocated to work sites without consultation, in at least three cases dying in the process.

But… I come back to two telling details. First, there are those women who managed to bring their sons with them. MacGinnis comments that perhaps there is some administrative rationale for mentioning these children. While he perhaps has in mind their potential as a labor force for the palace– as Svärd demonstrates was the case for the children of palace maids– these women were able to maintain their hold over their own children in the most subjected position possible.

And then there is the fact that 45 of them maintain their foreign names, which survive today as the only evidence of their people’s language. Something allowed or compelled them to be accounted not anonymously, or with meaningless (or demeaning) invented names, but with names of their own.

In her earlier thesis that more broadly treated women in Neo-Assyrian society, Svärd (then Teppo) wrote that

Most of the women known by their names appear in unspecified lists of women… Forty-nine women appear in lists of food rations. Ten of these are “dependents”. This might imply that there was some obligation to provide food for the workers. In lists of deportees 15 (two weavers included) women appear.

The newly translated tablet falls into this category. The fact that the palace was obliged to keep track of them, by name, is an enduring sign that their utility to the empire allowed there to be demands on those nominally holding all the power. Without their work, there was no empire.

[A note on orthography: Tushhan is used here because it is how the University of Akron team spells the name on its blog. The new article uses a spelling with a diacritic-- an inverted "^"-- over a single "s" in a spelling Tushan, for which I cannot reproduce the diacritic in this blog, apparently. Apologies to anyone confused by this.]

While the image conjured up by the name is the paper edition that graces many offices on campus, the Chronicle is also, like all viable media today, online. The editorial content covers general issues of interest to academia: currently, top articles include a discussion of blogging as scholarly activity, social networks, and dealing with student crises, while further down the home page there are a mass of links to articles about new developments by Harvard and MIT, and the role of Louisiana governor Bobby Jindal in the state university.

And like every online news outlet today (it seems), the Chronicle has blogs. One of those has set off a firestorm, rightly directed at what has to be the meanest, most ignorant, most anti-intellectual post I have seen in a supposedly legitimate media outlet.

Like many people, I heard of the blog post from an independent blogger who writes at Tressiemc. Following her lead, I am not linking to the Chronicle blog post, which attacks the research of Northwestern University’s first cohort of doctoral students in African American Studies. Her irritation seems to have been sparked by coverage of an event celebrating these and other historic programs covered as a news item by the Chronicle, along with a profile of doctoral students in the program.

Tressiemc does a fine job of making the case why this is shameful– and why the Chronicle of Higher Education should be ashamed of itself. She and others have spoken out to condemn the wretched person who wrote the original post. There are petitions. There is a response by the the faculty at Northwestern. There is outrage and it should be maintained.

But we all have to do more. There needs to healing; there needs to be an antidote to poison.

So here is my contribution.

One of those whose work was mentioned in the original blog post is a woman named Ruth Hays. For me, the most amazing thing about the attempt to ridicule her work is– it has the opposite effect. Here’s the original text (courtesy of Tressiemc):

Ruth Hayes’ dissertation, “‘So I Could Be Easeful’: Black Women’s Authoritative Knowledge on Childbirth.”… began because she “noticed that nonwhite women’s experiences were largely absent from natural-birth literature, which led me to look into historical black midwifery.”

What’s there to make fun of and dismiss here? This is women’s history pursuing an interesting and relevant topic; this is a place where asking questions about race is indispensable. Long-time readers of this blog will remember that one of the core texts in my course on archaeology of sex and gender is Laurie Wilkie’s book The Archaeology of Mothering: An African-American Midwife’s Tale. That book won the James Deetz Prize given by the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Am I wrong? is this not a legitimate topic?

Well, a quick search in the database America: History and Life turned up almost 250 scholarly articles dealing with midwifery.

Feminist Studies, a central journal in the field, published an article in 2010 titled “Downplaying Difference: Historical Accounts of African American Midwives and Contemporary Struggles for Midwifery”, by Christa Craven and Mara Glatzel, dealing with the way discrimination was downplayed in a selected of co-authored African American midwives’ memoirs.

Another article published in 2010, this one in Women’s History Review, by Tanfer Tunc, examines pregnancy and childbirth on pre-Civil War plantations, linking white and black women, and how professionalization of medicine changed the relationship between black midwives and the white women who they assisted to give birth.

I could go on at some length: the point is, the study of race, ethnicity, and the role of midwives is a well-established field of academic research. Work in this vein adds significantly to our understanding of health care delivery in the United States, and to differences in these experiences among different segments of the population.

I look forward to adding the work of Ruth Hays to the reading list for my course next year. Brava, and congratulations to her and to her mentors, professors, and cohort members at Northwestern.